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The fifteen essays in this collection, most of which are revised versions of papers presented at the Third European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (epff3) held in London in 2005, have as their focus the theme of loss. As the psychoanalyst and volume editor Andrea Sabbadini explains, “From the moment of birth when we lose the comfort of intrauterine life, to our last breath, losses of all kinds, and our efforts to gradually come to terms with them through mourning, constitute important points of reference in our existences” (2). These losses and their consequences—the “shadows” of the book's title—are explored by an interesting mix of psychoanalysts and film scholars who draw on various aspects of psychoanalytic and film theory to analyze characters, explore cinematic representations of fantasy and dreams, and show how temporality, movement, montage, sound, image, and the gaze intersect with the structures and functioning of intrapsychic processes.
Readers are likely to be familiar with many of the films discussed, among them Almodóvar's Talk to Her, Ozon's Under the Sand and The Swimming Pool, Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, and Bergman's Cries and Whispers. Essays on less well known films, including Marazzi's For One More Hour with You, Garrone's First Love, and Monnikendam's Mother Dao, the Turtle-like, offer the pleasure of discovery while highlighting the stylistic diversity and psychoanalytic complexity of European cinema. The variety of films is matched by the eclectic mix of theories used to discuss them, ranging from classic Freudian oedipal theory, Kleinian views on aggression and reparation, and Winnicott's ideas on play and the false self to Abraham and Torok's theories of introjection, incorporation, and the crypt, Lacan's concepts of suture and gaze, and Laplanche's elaboration of deferred action.
The essays, all of which are thoughtful and intellectually stimulating, also illustrate the differences between the way clinicians and film scholars have historically